California governor Pete Wilson recently took one of the most controversial stands of his career — and it had nothing to do with illegal aliens or affirmative action. Since last summer, Wilson has refused to accept a $ 42 million education grant from the federal government. Although the money has already been set aside for use in cash-strapped California schools, and comes with virtually no strings attached, Wilson has let it sit in a bank account untouched for the better part of a year. It seems likely he’ll end up sending it back to Washington. Wilson’s rationale: The money comes from Goals 2000, the Clinton administration’s signature education reform. And, in what surely ranks as a revolutionary move for a modern politician, the governor has decided it’s better to lose the funds than be seen to risk federal interference in his schools.
By Christmas, Wilson was coming under intense pressure in California to take the money. “The most important thing for people to do is to remain calm,” urged Maureen DiMarco, Wilson’s adviser for education matters. But hardly anybody did. Editorial writers from all over the state took to their keyboards to denounce the governor. (“Schools Starve As He Snubs Federal Education Funds, ” headlined the Los Angeles Times.) Reporters covering the fracas produced some of the least objective news coverage since the Spanish- American War. Scores of business leaders, including potentially large political contributors like the head of Hewlett-Packard, wrote letters of protest. And, of course, the teachers” unions went absolutely bananas.
Yet Wilson held firm, bolstered in his decision by parents and conservative lobbying groups across the state. One of Wilson’s supporters, Steve Baldwin, a Republican assemblyman from San Diego, summarized conservative objections to Goals 2000 in a letter to the governor last year. “Increasing federal assistance is not in California’s best interest,” Baldwin wrote, “as it cedes even more state control of the $ 30 billion education system to the federal government.”
Meanwhile, in a number of other states, similar controversies were breaking o ut over Goals 2000. Under pressure from conservatives, R epublican governors and legislatures in Virginia, Alabama, Montana, and New Hampshire decided to refuse Goals 2000 grants or never even sought them.
For Goals 2000, which became law in the spring of 1994, it was a hard, fast fall. The program had begun with such high hopes. The bill’s stated purpose, set out at the beginning of its 100-plus pages, offers some sense of what the Clinton administration had planned to achieve by passing it.
“By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn,” it begins, and it gets more hopeful — and more intrusive — from there: ” Every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol”; “the high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent”; “every adult American will be literate”; “all students will be knowledgeable about the diverse cultural heritage of this Nation and about the world community”; “every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well”; “every parent in the United States will be a child’s first teacher and devote time each day to helping such parent’s preschool child learn”; and so sweepingly on. At one point the ostensible education bill even boasts that “the number of low- birthweight babies will be significantly reduced through enhanced prenatal health systems.” Were all this actually to happen, observed the Nation in a lucid moment, “angels would descend from heaven and church bells would peal throughout the land, for a miracle would have occurred.”
Producing miracles is a tall order for any act of Congress, but the architects of Goals 2000 — a program that evolved from the Bush administration’s earlier stab at education reform, America 2000 — were nothing if not ambitious. In the brave new education system they imagined, government-sponsored experts would come up with “national standards” for history, math, and the arts — descriptions of what every student in the country should know before graduating from high school. States that redesigned their own curriculums to incorporate the standards, or made other government- specified attempts at education reform, would get grants from the Department of Education. A presidentially appointed body called the National Education Standards and Improvement Council would review and approve the state efforts.
Creating national standards wasn’t necessarily bad in theory — it would be nice if all American highschool students mastered basic concepts, and in fact it was the Bush Education department that initially proposed the idea. In practice, like a lot of the fine print in Goals 2000, it produced almost a parody of p.c. heavy-handedness. The much-publicized first draft of the National Standards for United States History contained 17 references to the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, while neglecting to mention Albert Einstein and the Wright brothers. (The Senate later voted 99 to 1 to reject the proposal.)
In retrospect, it’s no surprise the history standards flopped. Tampering with state curriculums is beyond the traditional — and some say the constitutional — scope of the federal government. On the few occasions when Washington has sought to bring systematic Order and Progress to the nation’s disparate school systems, as when Congress financed the “New Math” fiasco of the 1960s, the results have been ugly. Not to mention deeply resented by parents and school boards around the country. Goals 2000 turned out to have a predictably similar effect.
But it wasn’t just slanted history that gave Goals 2000 a bad reputation. It soon became clear that the authors of Goals 2000 hoped to forward an ideological agenda as they went about reforming American education. Title IX of the bill, for example, creates a kind of federal think-tank, the Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students, whose $ 30 million budget would be used, among other things, to promote “gender equity” in schools and conduct ” research on the development of culturally appropriate curriculum for American Indian and Alaska Native students.” In response to the large and persistent gap between the scores of white and black students on standardized tests, the Institute is charged with devising easier tests — or in its own words, developing “methods of assessing the achievement of students which are sensitive to cultural differences” and “[providing] multiple methods of assessing student learning.”
The aspects of Goals 2000 seen as perhaps most pernicious by those who fear t he bill, however, have little to do with education, at least as traditionally p racticed in American schools. In the name of “ensuring improvements in school r eadiness and the ability of students to learn effectively,” the bill encourages educators to become involved in every conceivable facet of a child’s life. Sect ion 309 of the bill tells participating states to identify “the most pressing n eeds facing students and their families w ith regard to social services, health care, nutrition, and child care.” Other sections recommend bringing federally funded day care and health clinics into schools — “one-stop shopping” for government-run social services.
Title X, the last, “miscellaneous” section of the bill, is particularly heavy with stipulations that have nothing to do with reading, writing, or math. Section 1043, for example, attempts to create a federal nonsmoking policy for elementary schools. Section 1018 not only calls for the creation of condom distribution programs in schools, but requires administrators to “develop procedures to encourage, to the extent possible, family participation in such programs.” Section 1051, an amendment to something called the Cranston- Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act, concerns itself with the creation of midnight basketball leagues — preferably in neighborhoods that contain a ” high incidence of persons infected with the human immunodeficiency virus or sexually transmitted diseases.”
It wasn’t long before criticism of Goals 2000 became deafening. Conservative Christian groups, long opposed to federal forays into education policy, mounted the loudest campaign against the program. At a news conference last June, Thomas DeWeese of the Virginia-based American Policy Foundation captured the general tone of the attacks when he described the effect of programs like Goals 2000 on schools: “The indoctrination methods . . . start in kindergarten, where students are filled with horror stories of ozone holes, dying species, homelessness and war. Yet many schools today have ceased teaching such basic skills as spelling and multiplication tables.” Other evangelical organizations characterized Goals 2000 as part of a plot to take over local schools and usurp parents” authority over their children. If some of the charges seemed overheated — conservative historian Diane Ravitch called them “bizarre, almost paranoid” — they worked.
The Department of Education soon began loosening the law’s requirements, granting waivers to states, essentially leaving governors free to take money from Goals 2000 without conforming to its plans for reform. As a result, says Denis Doyle, a political scientist at the Heritage Foundation who has followed Goals 2000 since its inception, “It turned out to be the least burdensome, the least intrusive federal program in memory, with nothing in the way of compliance.”
But that didn’t matter. In Virginia, Governor George Allen chose not to participate even though the millions his state was slated to receive could have been used for just about any education-related purpose imaginable — including, as one observer put it, “to fund a study of the invidious effects of modern education programs. And no one would have said “no” to him.” A number of local school districts around the country followed Allen’s lead. In a decision that sounds almost too principled to be true, the school board in Escondido, Calif., voted not to seek a $ 59,000 grant earmarked for literacy efforts, citing fears of federal entanglements. In a suburb of Milwaukee, an elementary school called Wisconsin Hills turned down Goals 2000 money that would have gone “to strengthen a partnership with parents.” According to one member of the school’s board, “Wisconsin Hills has its own resources and if they want to take on this project, they should use their own resources.”
Back in Washington, the Clinton administration watched as its most ambitious education program was rejected time and again in the states on similar grounds. In a phone call to author Ben Wattenberg, the president himself seemed to concede defeat, admitting that Goals 2000 “started out as a fine piece of work but didn’t end up that way.” Education secretary Richard Riley gamely mounted a defense of the program, insisting, “There is a lot of misinformation out there about Goals 2000 — and that is an understatement.” But to no avail. The House recently voted to zero out the meat of the funding for the law — $ 370 million in FY 1995 — while the Senate voted to chop it by $ 0 million. (The versions have yet to be reconciled.)
No matter how much money the program ends up receiving, it’s unlikely to accomplish much. Almost two years after the bill became law, nobody has even been appointed to its most important body, the National Education Standards and Improvement Council. Republicans have made it clear that as long as they are in power, nobody ever will be.
Goals 2000, in other words, is — at least for the moment — harmless, defanged by skeptical parents, conservative activists, and Republican politicians. “In point of fact,” says Denis Doyle, with some satisfaction, ” it’s been perfectly innocuous. It’s really what it could have been that’s scary.”
By Tucker Carlson
